Yesterday, I wrote about the realities of the elected officials on Capitol Hill and in the White House deliberately failing regular Americans while catering to their big corporate cronies, in a distorted, deceitful process that callously ignores and/or harms typical, struggling, working people and those millions out of work.

Today, we have another example of that destructive reality.

From Isaiah J. Poole at Campaign for America's Future: "Economist Robert Johnson says progressive activists are going to have to fight more aggressively against the forces on Capitol Hill and the White House who are working on behalf of the financial services industry to block financial reform, given the kinds of deals now being cut by the Obama White House and some Democrats in Congress.

Johnson, in the video interview above, says that while there is some good news in the recent moves toward creating a financial consumer protection agency, legislative proposals to curb the behavior of so-called "too-big-to-fail" banks remain seriously flawed.

The bottom-line problem, Johnson says, is that the campaign and lobbying dollars from the financial service industry is speaking louder than the general public. "I'd like to see voters mobilized to make people afraid to take Wall Street money," Johnson says.

Earlier, Johnson had a similar message in an interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. In that interview, he tells a personal story that dramatizes the difficulty reform advocates are having in getting their views heard in Congress."

But it's this paragraph that is telling....."Johnson is now the director of the newly created Institute for New Economic Thinking, which will use a 10-year, $50 million grant from financier George Soros to counter the "free-market fundamentalism" that helped set the stage for the financial crisis."

Obviously, it takes money to fight money, although, $50 million seems like chump change compared to the control wielded on Capitol Hill and in the White House by the gazillionaire corporations; the wealthy few.

It's not enough to exhort those disappointed and disgusted by last year's false promises to fight more aggressively to try and make DINOs do what they were elected to do and don't and won't.

Time to clean out the Augean stables of Republicans and DINOs (now the apparent majority on Capitol Hill and in the White House) in this next decade's election cycles.

Workers in this country need to look among themselves and their ranks for populist, progressive Democratic candidates for every office at every level.  Only then will things even begin change.